About the Film
«I don’t know how to tell a story,» says Amal, a young girl in the opening scene of Italian director Stefano Savona’s innovative documentary treatment of the «Zeitoun incident» of January 2009. This was the notorious Israeli military operation in a previously peaceful, rural district of Gaza City; which resulted in the death of 48 civilians, among which were 29 members of Amal’s clan, the Samouni.
Using film shot in the aftermath of the incident, archival footage, ghostly drone images of the attack, and artist Simone Massi’s powerful black and white, hand-drawn animation; Savona weaves a powerful story of the massacre and its aftermath. The film begins slowly with scenes of Amal in her pink sweater, walking, talking, watering plants, describing where the giant olive tree, the soul of the village, grew before it was destroyed.
Soon the pace picks up, as animation – dreamlike and ominous – is intercut with scenes of life in Gaza, the disparate threads of the story tied together by Amal’s recurring presence. Prefiguring worse events to come, Amal’s father, the clan’s storyteller, narrates the Koranic tale of Ababi to the visual accompaniment of Massi’s terrifying animations, in which the armor-clad behemoths of Abraha are defeated by a flock of birds swirling in the sky, dropping clay-baked stones upon the monsters. But the real terror begins when Israeli fighters descend from helicopters, their action on the ground depicted in greytoned drone footage with both soldiers and captives moving about in a silent landscape as impersonal white figures from beyond the grave.
Director Savona’s (Tahrir: Liberation Square) imaginative use of visual media, coupled
with masterful use of sound, creates a feeling of approaching doom through long sequences and flashbacks, pivoting in the final scenes to a foretaste of hope.
Nicole Guillemet
